


The Art of Hoping

by zjofierose



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam who?, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fate, Fate & Destiny, First Kiss, First Meetings, Friendship, Galaxy Garrison, Kid Fic, Lack of Communication, M/M, Orphan Keith (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Pre-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 07 Spoilers, Secrets, Socially Awkward Keith (Voltron), Soulmates, Waiting, in the sense that they meet when they're children, not that they have children, patience - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 09:17:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16658393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: Patience is the art of hoping





	The Art of Hoping

Shirogane Takashi is seven days old when the seer takes him in her wrinkled old hands and purses her lips in surprise. The expression is clear, even in the grainy darkness of the recording. Incense smoke swirls around her head, and the echo of bells ripples through the background.

“He has a soulmate,” she says in Japanese, and there’s a collective gasp from the onlooking cluster of family members. She passes a hand over his crown, marking his forehead with a streak of red. “His is a hard road. He will suffer greatly.”

The baby’s mother speaks up from the crowd, an audible catch in her voice. “Elder, will he find happiness?” 

The seer lifts the infant up, watching as his dark eyes blink in search of her face. “He will,” she answers finally, “but it will take much patience from him before it arrives.”

“Elder, how will he know his soulmate?” comes a male voice. “He bears no soulmark that we have seen. How will they recognize each other?”

Shirogane Takashi begins to cry in the seer’s cold, impersonal hands, but she clutches him close, peering into his mouth before shaking the  _ kagura suzu _ over him. “He will know them without question,” she says finally, “but they will not understand the significance of their bond, not until his loss. Still, silver when heated reveals its affinity for gold, and the moon’s radiance is a gift of the sun.”

She shakes the bells over him once more, clearly finished, and hands the infant back to waiting hands. The recorded image shakes and drops its angle as the baby’s uncle puts the camera down, and the feed goes black.

\--

Shirogane Takashi meets Keith Kogane when he is six and Keith is two. It’s a warm summer day, and he’s playing in front of their house when a brown-haired man walks past with Keith in his arms. Their eyes lock over the man’s shoulder, and the young Shirogane abandons his sidewalk chalk without question, following wordlessly along behind them for three blocks before the man notices him.

“Where you goin’, kiddo?” the man asks with a smile, dropping down to take a knee in front of Shiro. Keith takes the opportunity to scramble down from the man’s hold, and toddles over to where Shiro stands, examining him seriously before wrapping his chubby arms around Shiro’s middle. 

“Wherever you are,” Shiro answers the man earnestly, instinctively positioning himself to hold Keith close. “He’s my friend.”

\--

By the time Shiro is nine and Keith is five, Keith can’t remember a time without Shiro in his life. They spend endless hours together, the Shirogane clan having accepted Keith and his father into their family unit easily as the boys became immediately inseparable. They eat together at school, trade off weekends at each other’s houses. Keith and his father live outside of town in the desert, their sturdy wooden house in the sands a contrast to the Shirogane’s low-slung adobe-style home with a courtyard in the middle. Shiro loves the winds that drag around the farmhouse at night, while Keith lives to follow Shiro’s Baba around as she tends their potted gardens. 

When Shiro turns ten, his family holds a birthday party for him with all his friends. He eats too much cake, and opens all his presents, and he and Keith stay up watching movies about robots and aliens until his parents force them to bed far too late for him to be able to fall asleep. He lies awake till dawn, staring at the glowing stars on his ceiling and listening to Keith breathe beside him. It’s the best birthday he’s ever had.

The next night, after Keith has gone home, his parents bring out the video of his naming and put it on the screen in the living room. He watches solemnly as his father writes his name, as the seer proclaims his future. He watches as his infant self is hefted into the old woman’s arms, listens as the bells are rung. His mother holds his hand when the seer tells them he will suffer, but Shiro doesn’t seem troubled. They watch the video to the end, and then his parents turn to him, dabbing at their eyes. 

“Do you have any questions?” his mother asks, still wrapping his fingers in her own. 

“What does it mean to have a soulmate?” Shiro asks, looking between them. “I thought those were only in stories.”

His father nods. “It’s rare,” he says simply, “we don’t always know what it means. At the very least, there is a person in the world whose soul is so much in harmony with your own that it will bring you both great joy to know each other.”

“Will we fall in love?” Shiro asks quietly, looking down at the coffee table, then back up to meet their eyes. 

“Possibly,” his mother says, “but the seer said that you would have to wait. That you must be patient.”

Shiro nods thoughtfully. “I know who they are, but they don’t know it. Not right away.”

“That’s right, baby,” his mother said, stroking his hair. “But you will be happy.”

“I have to suffer, first,” Shiro says, and ducks his head. 

“But you will make it through,” his father answers, tipping Shiro’s chin up with his finger. “You will be strong, and you will be patient, and you will focus on being true to yourself. And in the end, your soulmate will recognize you, and you will be happy.”

“Can’t I just tell him?” Shiro asks then, looking at them with inquiring eyes, “It’s Keith. I know it is. If I tell him, then he’ll know, and I won’t have to be patient.”

“Baby,” his mother sighs, stroking a piece of hair out of his eyes, “better to not. He’s still only six, and soulmates are very rare. He won’t know what it means, he can’t understand it yet, and it’s not really fair to him to put that pressure on him. Maybe when you’re both older, then you can tell him. But not yet, okay?”

“Okay,” Shiro acquiesces reluctantly, “But I won’t wait too long.”

“You’re a good boy, Shiro,” his father says, resting a hand on his head. “Happy birthday.”

\--

When he’s eleven, Shiro is diagnosed with the disease that changes his life. Keith is seven, and doesn’t really understand why Shiro suddenly has to go to the doctor all the time, why sometimes he gets treatments that make him feel sick, or leave him in bed for days on end. He grows clingy, and doesn’t want to leave to go home, begging to stay at the Shirogane house and help, following Shiro’s mother and grandmother around as they cook nourishing soups and light incense for the altars. 

Eventually the doctors find a treatment that works sufficiently, and Shiro’s life returns to something approaching normal. He and Keith pick up where they left off with sleepovers and games and school, and by the time Shiro is twelve, he’s mostly learned to ignore the specter of illness that will hang over him for the rest of his foreseeable life. The seer said he would suffer, but that he would find happiness, he tells himself, so clearly the disease will not take him from the world before he’s had a chance at joy.

He holds Keith in his heart, a gentle secret. The temptation to tell him is strong, but Shiro resists. He doesn’t really understand why his parents don’t want him to, but he respects their wishes. Besides, he thinks, knowing or not knowing doesn’t change what Keith is to him, what they are to each other. So if Shiro keeps the word “soulmate” bottled up in his chest, it makes no difference to their relationship. 

Keith turns eight in the fall, and his father is dead by spring, lost to a house fire that got bad faster than expected. Keith moves in with the Shiroganes, the second son they never had, and he and Shiro become closer than ever, even as Keith withdraws from everyone else. 

\--

Puberty is a challenge. Shiro turns thirteen while Keith is still an undersized nine, and grows six inches in a year. He makes some new friends, goes out for the middle school’s football team, and takes a cute student from his math class to the seventh grade winter formal. Keith is still the most important person in his world, still the one he comes home to at night, still the one who keeps him company while they do their homework, who watches sappy space romance movies with him if he’s sick. But Shiro’s world is opening up while Keith is still coping with the changes of losing his father and moving in with his friend, leaving the house he grew up in to gather sand while he sleeps on a trundle bed in Shiro’s room. It’s hard on them both, and Shiro waits anxiously for the time when they will return to a more even footing.

By the time Keith makes it to thirteen, Shiro has turned seventeen and enlisted in the Galaxy Garrison’s junior training program. His scores are off the charts, his grades are top of his class, and in spite of his disease, he is in prime physical condition to join the astro-corps. He is the shining pinnacle of all that is good in the family, beloved by friends, family, and teachers alike.

Keith, meanwhile, is still small, still dark and quiet, equally brilliant but with difficulty focusing on anything that doesn’t grab his interest. He dogs Shiro’s steps unceasingly, having already petitioned to be granted early entrance to the Galaxy Garrison at the end of the next school year, the summer he’ll be fourteen. He’s waiting to hear the response when the school year ends and Shiro has to pack his bags for summer training. The Garrison isn’t far by miles, just a mere ninety of them from where they live, but it may as well be the moon for as much as any of them will be able to see Shiro after he goes.

“I’ll write every day,” Shiro whispers into Keith’s ear, holding him close on the morning he leaves. His father will be driving him to the shuttle that will take him to the base, but his mother, grandparents, and Keith are seeing him off from the house. “I’ll tell you everything. You’ll get so sick of hearing about it you’ll never want to come,” he promises, and Keith shakes his head fiercely. 

“Never,” he says, and his voice is rough. “Shiro,” he says, burying his face in Shiro’s chest, wrapping his arms around Shiro’s waist like he did the first time he laid eyes on him. “I love you. You’re my brother.” He exhales hard. “You better write.”

Shiro’s arms come even harder around him. “I love you too, Keith,” he says, and holds on tight. He only lets go when his father makes him, forcing himself to smile as he walks to the car.

\--

Keith receives notice of his approved early admission by Christmas, and spends the remaining six months between his approval paperwork’s arrival and his enlistment driving everyone up the wall with his utter dedication to getting prepared. He still hasn’t grown much in height, but he becomes whipcord strong, taking up running and martial arts in an effort to burn off some of his anxious energy. His face changes between the rare visits when Shiro sees him, beginning to show the definition that Shiro’s sure is going to make him an absolutely stunning adult, even as his eyes remain huge and guileless, his hair a dark nest of chaos.

Shiro comes home to visit the week before Keith’s enlistment date, and they spend it watching old movies and catching up. There’s a space between them at first, in spite of the endless letters and messages they’ve sent, but it eases as the week goes on. Their room has become more of Keith’s room now, and it’s Shiro sleeping on the trundle since Keith has taken the bed in his absence. Shiro doesn’t fit on the mattress, his legs hanging off to a comic degree. Still, he’s slept in worse situations during his first year at the Garrison, so he lies awake uncomplaining and stares at the stars on the ceiling as he listens to the familiar sounds of Keith breathing.

Shiro’s father drives them to the Garrison at the end of the week, proud tears in his eyes as he embraces them both before climbing back into the car to make the drive home. They stand together and watch as he pulls away, duffel bags beside them, uniforms already coated in the omnipresent dust.

\--

It’s not a painless adjustment for Keith, even, or perhaps especially, with Shiro’s presence. It’s the closest public quarters they’ve been in since grade school, and Shiro’s forgotten how prickly Keith can be with anyone who’s not family. It doesn’t help that Keith’s been spending all his time leading up to his arrival working to best Shiro, who is ranked at the very top of the cadet program. This means that Keith enters his year by blowing everyone in his class and the class above him right out of the water without half trying, his sim scores and aptitude testing simply off the charts. Shiro couldn’t be more proud, but he thinks he might be the only one. 

“They hate me,” Keith mumbles into Shiro’s shoulder at the end of the first month, his head bonking onto Shiro’s collarbone with a solid thunk. “Why do they hate me, Shiro? Am I that hard to deal with?” He looks up then, and Shiro’s heart cracks in his chest at the expression on Keith’s face. He can hear the unspoken question hanging between them,  _ do you hate me, too? _

“Hey,” Shiro says, dragging Keith into a hug and waiting until Keith’s arms go reluctantly around him. “Most of them don’t actually hate you. They’re just frustrated because you’re consistently better than them at everything.” He laughs, rubbing a hand over Keith’s hair. “That’s their problem, not yours.”

“Some of them hate me,” Keith murmurs, and Shiro rubs a hand soothingly over his back. 

“Fuck ‘em,” he says firmly, “if they can’t see the you that’s worth knowing, then they don’t deserve to know you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Shiro,” Keith grumbles, and Shiro pulls back to take him by the shoulders and look him in the eye. 

“It does.” He smiles, waits for Keith to roll his eyes, then continues. “Listen. Never,  _ ever _ , compromise yourself just to get someone to like you. You are worth so much more than that. You are brilliant, you are competent, you are a good person, and I love you. Okay?”

“ _ Ugh _ ,” Keith says, but he’s smiling, “you’re such a sap.”

“Yeah,” Shiro grins, “but I’m your sap.”

“Yeah,” Keith sighs, shoving Shiro playfully in the stomach, “I guess you are.”

\--

Two years in, Shiro’s made officer and Keith’s still at the top of his class and is systematically breaking Shiro’s own records. He’s still green, still learning, but his potential has teachers and commanders alike watching him like a hawk. He inspires Shiro to work harder, to do better, even as his own workload and responsibility increases exponentially. 

It’s not easy though, not for either of them: Shiro’s popular where Keith is avoided. Shiro’s lauded while Keith is tolerated. They excel in similar ways, but Shiro does it with a grace and seeming ease that’s foreign to Keith’s whole being, and Shiro is the only one who doesn’t seem to care. People don’t understand their relationship, either, can’t figure out what to do with their closeness. They’re not brothers, but friends isn’t quite right either.  _ Soulmates _ , Shiro thinks to himself, but he can’t bring himself to say it. It’s been his secret too long. 

They muddle through past Keith’s fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth birthdays, as Shiro turns nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. He knows he’s supposed to feel like an adult, but it doesn’t feel that different. All this goals are still ahead of him, in spite of the wall of awards in his small, private room and the row of bars on his dress uniform. His disease worsens for a while, setting him back, but Keith coddles him slavishly, forgoing his own workload to nurse Shiro back to health, snarling fiercely at any suggestion that he do otherwise. 

The Kerberos news should feel like a victory, but instead Shiro just feels numb. He fought so hard to get it, worked so much, learned so many things, argued to such length with his doctors and superior officers. He knows they wouldn’t have given it to him just because he wanted it, but it still feels almost like a capitulation on their part. He’s not dumb; he knows he’s the Garrison’s golden boy, and that means he knows what it would have looked like if they’d refused him. He soaks up the praise in public as his due, and keeps his doubts quiet and contained.

He does get permission to tell Keith before it’s announced, but he’s not prepared for the way Keith clings to him at the news. Keith’s been working on maturity, on holding himself more aloof, more separate. He’s forging his own identity, and Shiro respects the hell out of it, even if it feels a little lonely sometimes. Keith deserves not to live in Shiro’s shadow, Shiro wants more for him than that, but he hates the way it’s meant they’re not as joined at the hip as they once were. 

“A year,” Keith whines into Shiro’s sweatshirt, “I don’t think I can do it.” He looks up at Shiro, fists clenched and eyes damp, and Shiro knows this is Keith at his most honest, most open. He also knows that Keith would never actually want him to not take this chance, knows that Keith knows it too, so he wraps his arms around Keith’s wiry frame, lifting his chin up to settle it on the top of Keith’s head, and rocks them back and forth, just gently.

“I know,” he says softly. “Me either.”

\--

When the Galra take him, he thinks,  _ ah - so this is suffering _ . 

He lies alone in his cell and dreams of Keith, hallucinates the tiny, glow in the dark stars of their childhood bedroom on the ceiling of his captivity. He wakes in total darkness and wonders what they’ve told him, wonders if he even knows, or if he’s waiting, still waiting, for Shiro’s return.

When he fights, he fights to win. He has a soulmate and the promise of happiness, and there is nothing in this universe that can make him give up that hope. 

“Patience,” he whispers to himself in the silence after a battle as blood drips from the corner of his mouth, as they slice his arm from his body and mold him into a monster. “ _ Patience _ .”

Patience is the watchword that has gotten him through so much already, and it gets him through so much more. He clings to it as he hurtles toward Earth in a stolen Galra ship, as they try to figure out how to meld space lion-ships into a giant space robot, as they fight Zarkon, as he dies. Patience is the light in the darkness of the astral plane, glowing in the times when he can’t see Keith’s spirit. Patience gets him through the period of readjustment to corporeality when he’s placed into his new better-but-also-worse body. It holds him through the trip back to Earth, no longer their leader and without a role to fill, it gives him the focus to see the solution in front of him and to bring Atlas to life.

“ _ Patience _ ,” he tells himself when he wakes in the morning, when he eats his lunch, when he issues orders, when he looks at Keith, still foreign to him but just as beautiful and even more dear.

“ _ Happiness _ ,” is what he whispers to himself at night.

\--

“They told me after you left,” Keith says one night when Shiro finds him alone on the observation deck of the Atlas. Keith doesn’t look at him, stares fixedly at the stars out the window in front of him. Shiro catches his breath, but makes himself settle down beside Keith anyway as though his heart isn’t climbing up his throat to choke him. 

Keith’s face is calm, the scar that Shiro left on his cheek long healed, half-hidden by his dark hair. It’s as unruly as it was when he was a child, and Shiro aches to brush it with his fingers, but he fears to crack the space between them.

“I felt…” Keith starts, and it’s the first time Shiro’s heard Keith’s voice this ragged since Shiro came out of the healing pod post-resurrection. “When you were gone,” Keith starts again, and Shiro can see the tears standing in the corner of his eyes even as Keith looks resolutely forward at the gently spinning stars, “it felt like someone came in and gutted me. Like they took my mother’s knife and cut me open from neck to navel, and scooped out everything inside of me and laid it out on the ground.”

“ _ Keith _ ,” Shiro whispers, but Keith shakes his head hard, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around him. 

“I went crazy, Shiro. I don’t have any words for it other than that. I lost my mind. Without you…” his voice trails off, and he’s openly crying now, but his face is still calm. “Without you, I didn’t know how to live. I couldn’t function.”

Keith goes quiet for a long moment, and Shiro knew, he’d known, that there were things Keith hadn’t told him, but this… 

“So your parents finally told me. That we’re…  _ soulmates _ .” Keith spits the word, and Shiro feels a small piece of him wither at the tone in Keith’s voice. “That you  _ had  _ to be alive out there, somewhere, because some old woman had said you’d have happiness. Had said that you had a soulmate, and that they’d be too fucking  _ stupid  _ to know your worth until you were gone.”

Shiro reaches carefully over to set his hand on Keith’s shoulder, giving Keith plenty of opportunity to shift away, but it’s killing him not to touch. Keith allows it, but makes no sign of acknowledgement. 

“I decided then that it couldn’t be me,” he says, and turns to face Shiro for the first time. “It couldn’t  _ possibly  _ be me, because I  _ did  _ know your worth. I knew  _ everything  _ you were to me.” His face is anguished, his eyes bright and pleading. “And then, when you came back, when I found you, I thought… maybe. Maybe. But you never said a word. And Shiro,” Keith pauses for breath, for words, and Shiro can’t move. “Shiro, you kept leaving. And every time,  _ every time _ . I thought… this is it. Maybe he’s already had his happiness. Maybe he’s been happy with someone else. How would I know? You never told me.” His tone is bitter, and Shiro gives in to every instinct that’s screaming within him and drags Keith up close, wrapping Keith’s balled up form in his arms and burying his face in Keith’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, as Keith shakes in his embrace. “I’m so _ , so _ , sorry.”

“Is it me,” Keith asks, his voice small and tight, “Takashi, am I your soulmate?”

“Yes,” Shiro breathes, “I knew the minute I saw you. I didn’t even know that I had a soulmate yet, but I knew you were the brightest thing in my whole world.” Keith muffles a sob in Shiro’s uniform shirt, and Shiro holds him tighter, rocking them mindlessly back and forth in small, comforting motions. “They gave me the word for it when I was ten, showed me the recording of it. I knew it was you, Keith. It’s always been you. It could never, ever, be anyone else.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Keith asks, his voice angry around the edges in direct contrast to way his hands are clutching at Shiro’s arms, neck, any part of Shiro he can reach. 

"I don’t have a good answer for that.” Shiro sighs. “I always meant to, but first you were too young, and then we were at the Garrison together and I didn’t want to complicate things even more.” He shifts Keith around in his hold until he’s curled more or less on Shiro’s lap, arms around his neck as Shiro wraps his good arm around Keith’s back and grips him close. “After being captured, and Voltron, and then being gone, and everything that’s happened since… I think I was just used to keeping it a secret.” He rubs his head against Keith’s face, trying to familiarize himself all over again with the smell of him. “And also, patience.”

Keith laughs, short and sharp. “God, you’ve always loved that word, haven’t you?”

Shiro shrugs. “It’s what I was taught. If I was patient, everything would work out okay. I’d get to be happy. I think I was still waiting for that perfect moment.” He goes quiet for a moment, clearing his throat before he continues. “I wanted to tell you once I was done suffering, I didn’t want you to suffer with me. I wanted for my patience to carry me through to the end, and then I’d tell you, and I’d get to be happy.” He pauses. “We’d get to be happy.”

“It never occured to you that your suffering would make me suffer regardless?” Keith asks incredulously. “It never occured to you that maybe  _ telling me _ was the thing that would bring about the happiness?” 

It’s what he imagines it must feel like to be struck by lightning, the sudden illuminating clarity that rips through his system, destroying his every long-held notion from the inside out. He sees his whole life laid out in front of him, a series of quiet denials, a hidden secret kept safe and silent from the one person who could save him from it. 

“No,” he manages to say eventually, “no, it didn’t.”

Keith turns in his grasp and looks up at him then, his face tear streaked and achingly fond. “Shirogane Takashi,” he says, glaring at him even as his eyes start to roll, “you are an  _ idiot _ .”

It’s not over, Shiro knows this, not yet. There is suffering still to be had, for him, for Keith, probably for the rest of the team as well. But he can feel the happiness spreading in his chest, fighting through to become the light that illuminates them both. 

“Yeah,” Shiro agrees easily, holding Keith’s gaze, “but I’m your idiot.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and kisses him, hard and fierce “I guess you are.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> for the square on my Voltron bingo card entitled "Patience". I keep trying to write short things for these and then failing. Like, ok, 4k isn't that huge, but I was aiming for more like 1k... 
> 
> ps: don't you love the idea of patience as an art SO MUCH MORE than patience as a virtue??? I know I do!!!


End file.
